Welcome to What's Best Forum! Please consider joining our friendly and helpful community of enthusiasts where we discuss the best in audio and video to everything else we love from food to movies and music. We are proud of the professional conduct of our membership and strict moderation of the same, combined with high level of technical content shared by our members. If you want to learn and have fun doing it, or share what you know about our favorite hobbies without fear of antagonism, WBF forum is for you.
Registration is free and fast, and allows you to post in the forum in addition to the system remembering where you left off in your favorite threads.

One thing is obvious, sending a signal to a DAC is done using a 100% analog wave.
But can software affect this wave?
An explanation might be the way the data is processed.
Is it done in bursts or is it throttled. The burst might induce periodic jitter, the throttle a constant jitter level.
However, if this is true I want to see measurements e.g the eye pattern when playing software A or software B.
Personally I don’t mind any claim about improved sound quality by any piece of software but if it does something I like to see at least a measurable difference.

One issue with USB is that it sends regular bursts of info like the start of frame packet - "The SOF packet consisting of an 11-bit frame number is sent by the host every 1ms ± 500ns on a full speed bus or every 125 µs ± 0.0625 µs on a high speed bus". If the timing of this shifts or is variable, this could elicit a different & variable reaction from the USB receiver & translate into a different & varying jitter or noise spectrum. Making the PC end as solid & stable as possible without undue processing could be one factor in ameliorating this variation. It might not be the low level of jitter that we notice but the variation in jitter - that's one reason why I say that the measurements we currently run seem not to be capable of picking up these issues or we are not directing them to the correct target for measuring.

Manufacturer digital products www.Ciunas.biz
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin.

All these things need to be teased out to have a full grasp of at least one aspect of computer audio. We are at the discovery phase at the moment so guesses & claims & denials, etc are par for the course as witnessed here.

This is my first post as well.
I'm currently using JRiver v.16 and found it superior to Media Monkey (both for sound and as a database manager) on my Goodwin's Silent Server. Tried to use JPlay with it and it was VERY problematic. My question for you is whether you tried JRiver by itself before you added JPlay and whether there was a significant improvement.

Look forward to any results you might present but I don't know if you will find it in jitter levels? It's true that if there is an audible difference then it should be seen in the analogue output but what measurement do we use & what level are we viewing down to. I contend that FFT analysis may not be the correct test method as it uses multiple samples to average over time - will it for instance show the time-smearing of different digital filters? The focus in audio measurement still is rooted in the frequency domain (except when speakers are being measured) - I believe this focus has to change & perhaps new measurements introduced.

My analyzer is "dual domain" so can measure in analog domain in addition to FFT based digital.

This is my first post as well.
I'm currently using JRiver v.16 and found it superior to Media Monkey (both for sound and as a database manager) on my Goodwin's Silent Server. Tried to use JPlay with it and it was VERY problematic. My question for you is whether you tried JRiver by itself before you added JPlay and whether there was a significant improvement.

I started with Media Monkey, then switched to JRiver v.17, then added JPLAY for JRiver. Each step was an improvement. The step up to JPLAY was bigger than the switch from Media Monkey to JRiver. I believe you need to upgrade to JRiver v.17 before adding JPLAY.

I started with Media Monkey, then switched to JRiver v.17, then added JPLAY for JRiver. Each step was an improvement. The step up to JPLAY was bigger than the switch from Media Monkey to JRiver. I believe you need to upgrade to JRiver v.17 before adding JPLAY.

Or you could try running Jplay in standalone mode to hear what it sounds like - JPlaymini & then use whatever front end suits your needs - Foobar or JRiver or MP3Toys or ......

Manufacturer digital products www.Ciunas.biz
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin.

This information is suspect. rhbblb signed up to post about jplay and seven of eight posts are about jplay.

JRiver has asked jplay to remove all references to JRiver from their site. So far, they have not done so.

Mr. J River,
Get a life. The last time I looked this was a hobby. If you think I signed up to WBF to post about JPLAY you are sadly mistaken. If you believe that it is suspect that JRiver is superior to Media Monkey, so be it. nuff said.